1.2 Case Study: Céide Fields

In Ireland, boglands – wetland regions comprising water and decomposing vegetation, such as peat underneath the surface and sphagnum moss on the surface – are important aspects of the Irish Landscape that hold histories relevant to physical, human and cultural geography.

Bogs offer an important setting for the preservation of a range of artefacts – from human bodies and barrels of butter to ships and farm lands. Because of their lack of oxygen and acidic soil, bogs are able to preserve these artefacts for thousands of years without decomposition. The bogs of Ireland are physical landscapes that tell historians and geographers alike what happened in a place across a long period of time.

In this section, we will look at an example of how bogs have preserved land systems in Ireland that are thousands of years old through a case study of Céide Fields. As mentioned above, Céide Fields is an area on the west coast of Ireland that dates nearly 6,000 years old. Blanket bogs formed over the region beginning around 2,300 B.C.E.; over time, blanket bogs ultimately covered the area of farming communities, degrading the farm land and forcing out farming communities who had lived on Ireland’s west coast from earlier in the Neolithic period (beginning in approximately 3,500 B.C.E.) (O’Connell, Molloy, and Jennings 2020). These farmers had cleared the originally forested land (mainly of pine trees) to create space for agriculture, which archeologists believe allowed for crop growth nearly year-round during the time that the farmers inhabited the land. A subsequent change in climate, around 2,300 B.C.E., precipitated the formation of blanket and raised bogs that made the land unfarmable – and thus uninhabitable – for those living in the region; however, the change in climate also allowed for the large-scale preservation of the aforementioned farming systems through the boglands’ combination of little oxygen and acidic soil.

The contemporary discovery of Céide Fields occurred in the 1930s when a schoolteacher, Patrick Caulfield, noticed piles of rocks while cutting peat, that ultimately revealed portions of the oldest known field system in the world (Irish Archaeology n.d.). The uncovering and preservation of this region followed Caufield’s discovery, and today, Céide Fields is an example of a Celtic field system that you can visit, and is scheduled to become a UNESCO world heritage site (Irish Archaeology n.d.). In Figure 1.6 below, the red lines depict the extent and scale of these fieldwalls that divided up farming land, uncovered at the Céide Fields bogs in the 1930s. In the top right-hand corner, you can see that these walls are only a portion of the discovered walls, with more discovered to the south-east of the site where the visitor centre is located. Also note the broken red lines in the southern portion of Figure 1.6 – do the gaps in walls and isolated wall segments suggest uncovered or undiscovered parts of the fieldwalls, yet to be discovered?

Interactive Video Activity

Watch the film trailer (Figure 1.7) to learn more about Céide Fields, and answer questions in the interactivity to test your knowledge. This trailer also offers unique vantage points for seeing the extent and discovery of the fieldwalls of Céide fields; for example:

• at 00:27, 01:35, and 2:00, the panoramic aerial view shows the distance of the fieldwalls
• at 00:54-00:58, you can see the walls upclose to get a sense of how they were built
• at 1:23, you can see the process of uncovering the walls under the bog

Figure 1.7 Theatrical trailer for Céide Fields, a documentary film, directed by Davide Gambino, available on Vimeo. View Source This video is included on the basis of Vimeo’s terms of service.

The blanket and raised boglands of west Mayo are responsible for preserving hundreds of hectares of stone-walled fields (Heritage Ireland 2024). Inside the contemporary visitors centre, you can learn about the many discoveries underneath the bogs that tell stories about human inhabitation and farm practices of the Neolithic period – including what residents of the time would eat, their harvesting practices, their cultural and sacred practices, and their journey to the land itself, including the trials and risks taken to inhabit the land and develop it into the farming system that we know it for today. In the Céide Fields visitor centre, you can contextualize this discovery in more depth, with visualizations such as Figure 1.6 above telling the story of these boglands over time.